Fact (mostly)

A couple of years ago, I started writing another novel, Bote Manchas Metro. I finished the first draft about this time last year. A couple of read-throughs and many revisions later, I sent it off to an editor for developmental editing.

The editor proofread Frontal Lobe Override and went well beyond proofreading. I loved that she was opinionated and forthright. I wanted her to be the developmental editor for Bote Manchas Metro, so I contacted her. She agreed even though she no longer accepted new clients (I counted as an old client).

I wish I had followed standard editor hiring procedures. Had I hired her the correct way, we would have agreed on the process and I would saved thousands of dollars and three months. The project went off the rails from the start, but I had not done the work to find out. A month went by without a single word or note. I sent a message asking why? She sent assurances that everything was fine. Another month, another inquiry, another assurance. In the end, and a day before the project end date, she dumped an oblique letter which referenced her extensive manuscript markup. It was a mess.

Here’s what went wrong. I wanted developmental editing to be an iterative process. For Frontal Lobe Override, I hired an editor for an editorial assessment. A couple of weeks later, he sent a detailed letter and a minor markup (editor, it seems, just can’t help themselves). I made several revisions, and hired the same editor to look at the novel again concentrating on the revisions. He did and we discussed, via phone call, the project. I thought developmental editing would be similar just with out having to go through the hiring process twice.

The editor for Bote Manchas Metro, thought developmental editing was just advanced copy ediitng. I pointed out the editing guidelines from Reedsy.com, the site I hire editors through. She back tracked a little. Her editorial letter read like a throw together meant to meet the bare minimum of the guidelines and mostly served to point to the markup.

It took me two months to disentangle the copy editing from more developmental observations. It was frustrating and tedious work. Going through a markup is a destructive process. The idea is to work off all the revisions, accepting some, rejecting others. In my word processing software, it takes a lot of right clicking, regular clicking and occasional typing. The worst part, the editor decided to reformat the entire novel which, in my editor, meant that I had to accept or reject every paragraph and alomost every sentence. In the end, I scrapped Bote Manchas Metro.

Headlines brought the novel back. In particular a Los Angeles Times article about California corrections officers are looking at the Norwegian prison system (https://www.latimes.com/california/story/2023-11-09/how-do-you-reform-california-prisons-to-be-more-like-norway-hire-more-guards). A year earlier, I wrote the Professor of Practical Philosophy chapter. The character works in a think tank. He proposes a prison reform plan called the Individualized Judicial Release Plan.

The idea came from a discussion with a neighbor. Her husband was in prison. I’m not sure why he was incarcerated, I never asked. As she described what her husband was going through, I brought up my long term observation that Americans do not know what we want from out justice system. The typical response is that prisons should be punitive. A slightly more enlightened view is that prison sentences should provide sufficient deterrence to committing crime. Both notions have proven false.

A just society wants our justice system to provide us with good citizens who are unlikely to commit crimes again. America has tried various reform programs with little success. About the best thing we can say about our prison reform efforts is that it has turned some repeat offenders into law students, some of whom have even passed the bar.

I based the IJRP on education’s Individualized Education Plans where parents, their child and educators get together to develop a plan that all believe uses school district resources to best suit the child’s skills, goals and needs. Although IEPs are only available for Special Education students. Pitty. They could make America’s lagging schools much more effective for every student. But then again. It would cost a tonne. And that’s the problem.

Growing up, there was a meme, “Death Penalty for Parking Tickets (it cuts down on recidivism).” In order to keep costs down, IJRPs would have a termination date. Prisoners who failed to make progress on their IJRPs would be executed. I didn’t bring this up with my neighbor. She already said that her husband simply cannot resist temptations for long. She still loves her husband, so telling her that he is not fit for society wouldn’t go over well.

My novel just touches on this subject. It does not delve into larger questions such as:

• Can our society afford to keep people unfit to productively participate?
• Is it alright to export problem members of society to other societies (think Britain’s penal colonies in America and Australia)?
• Is it moral to execute recivid criminals? “Death Penalty for Parking Tickets” is absurdum ad reductio but drawing actual lines on what is executable or not is difficult, and judicial systems can, and often are, corrupted. Factor in increased incarceration costs and decreasing resources and it is easy to see how things reduce to death penalties for parking tickets.

Interesting issues, but my point was that I was a year or more ahead of the headline. Another topic in my novel is treatment and attitudes of homelessness. A recent Supreme Court decision allows states to make homelessness illegal. Within a week California’s governor ordered counties to remove homeless encampments. In my novel, the mayor of Bote Manchas was systemically sweeping away homeless people. The lack of an appropriate dustbin posses real life problems. There are many issues here, but the important thing is that I was two years ahead of this issue.

Anyways, I prepared Bote Manchas Metro for developmental editing, again. This time I followed hiring procedures and the developmental editing went well. The novel is now off to copy editing. In the mean time, I can drop a blog entry or two. I owe a book review on Freedom’s Just Another Word by Len Joy. I also need to arrange for reprint permissions for six songs whose lyrics I snipped for the novel.